NOVEL TELLS A TALE OF THE JEWS THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM. BY MAREK HALTER; TRANSLATED BY LOWELL BLAIR. HOLT. $19.95.

After he was shot during a raid on the Riga ghetto in Latvia in December 1941, the dean of Jewish historians, Simon Dubnov, cried out, "Screibt un farschreibt! (Write and record!)" His impassioned command reminded Jews that the act of bearing witness was crucial to maintaining the bloodlines of genealogy in the face of racial oblivion.

For Jews, to be a scribe is a revered responsibility. Beginning with the Old Testament scribe who "wrote the words of the Lord from the mouth of Jeremiah," scribes have written and recorded the laws of the Torah, the interpretations of the Talmud, family genealogies and social histories.

French writer, artist and human rights activist Marek Halter (the name means scribe) is descended from a long line of scribes: Gabriel, a 15th century printer who worked with Gutenberg; Berl, who printed L'Ami du Peuple, one of the manifestos of the French Revolution; Meir-Ikhiel, who printed Yiddish tracts calling for workers to unite against the Czar; his grandfather Abraham, who published an underground newspaper in the Warsaw ghetto; his father Salamon, a printer; and his mother Perl, a Yiddish poet.

Several years ago, Halter began to speculate about the Halter genealogy prior to Gabriel. The Book of Abraham is the product of Halter's imagination and his prodigious research into the origins of the Halter family. Blending fictional and historical reconstructions, the 722-page novel traces 2,000 years of Jewish history through the 100 generations of the Halter family. A highly acclaimed best seller in Europe, it now has been translated into English by Lowell Blair.

The first scribe in The Book of Abraham is Abraham, who lives in the Jerusalem of 70 A.D. He awakens one morning and scans the sky for signs. He sees portents of the Jews' destruction by the conquering Roman armies. Abraham and his family flee, initiating the 2,000-year diaspora odyssey of the Halter family through the Middle East and Europe. The umbilical cord of the family is Abraham's scroll, on which he records births, marriages and deaths. On his death, he passes the scroll on to his son, and it is passed from father to son for 100 generations.

The novel interweaves the history of the Halters with the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the black plague, pogroms, wars and revolutions. In the face of everything that attempts to strip away what they are, the Halters maintain their legacy and identity through the record of the family scroll.

"The book became the sole weapon of the people of Israel," Halter writes. "To triumph is to endure . . . The scroll represented: respect for tradition, the duty to bear witness, the determination to pass on the heritage . . . (It was) a stunning victory over the tragedies of the human condition: slavery, death, oblivion."

Although historical fiction is a popular vogue, most readers are familiar with it through its bastardized forms -- the set-designer novelists whose historical background is as flimsy as a scenic backdrop. Halter's novel is a welcome reminder of the artistic and intellectual vigor that is at the heart of skillfully conceived and executed historical fiction.

As a historical archaeologist, Halter not only exhumes the past but reanimates it, providing us with a living history that is a dense and intricate tapestry composed of the threads of individual lives lovingly stitched into the larger canvas. His novel is both gripping and rigorously thought-provoking.

Outside the family narrative, Halter offers fascinating asides that describe his genealogical quest. These passages glow with his compassionate wisdom and the clarity of his intelligence. Readers of The Book of Abraham will discover, in the words of Walt Whitman, that "this is no book,/Who touches this touches a man."